The paper highlights the larger historical and cultural context in which French representations of Cairene architecture developed from the eighteenth century onward. It considers, on one hand, the general philosophies underlying the collections assembled by artist-travelers such as Cassas or by Napoléon's scientists in charge of the Description de l'Egypte at the end of the eighteenth century and, on the other, the later theoretical frameworks developed by Gustave Le Bon and Jules Bourgoin in the 1870s-1880s. It discusses the endurance, well into the nineteenth century, of Enlightenment ways of looking at monuments in Cairo. The hypothesized persistence of Enlightenment thinking in the approaches to Cairene monuments developed by French antiquarians is examined in particular through three key aspects: the sensitivity to political conditions, the tension between history and theory, and the lure of rational analysis.